The origin of the term "Viral Marketing"
According to www.dfj.com: In 1997, when DFJ first coined the term in Netscape newsletter (www.dfj.com/viralmarketing), we used several examples to illustrate the phenomenon, without defining it more precisely than "network-enhanced word of mouth." Its original inspiration came from the pattern of adoption of Hotmail beginning with its launch in 1996. Tim Draper persuaded the company to include a promotional pitch for its Web-based email with a clickable URL in every outbound message sent by a Hotmail user. Therein lay one of the critical elements of viral marketing: every customer becomes an involuntary salesperson simply by using the product. The product is fundamentally a communications product, and the marketing piggybacks on the message. Hotmail grew its subscriber base from zero to 12 million users in 18 months, more rapidly than any company in any media in the history of the world.
About.com has numerous articles on Viral Marketing: "Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly."
http://marketing.about.com/cs/viralmarketing/index.htm
